Four Things to Review

A Friday Hodgepodge

When I stumble across possibly useful things on the web, I'll bookmark them with a to-do tag to look at later. Here are a few you might also find useful.

1. If you need to get a quick weather forecast for the week ahead, the National Weather Service is good, as long as you're in the U.S.

But for anywhere else, you might feel stuck with how slow and resource-hogging the bigger commercial sites have gotten.

You might find timeanddate (same example for comparison, but scroll down for week; here's Paris) to be a relief if you want your "quick check" of the weather to be quick.

The site also provides lots of other information, like sunrise/sunset, time zone information, and moon phases.

2. They aren't all underground websites (unless can't find with Google is your criterion), but many of these "useful underground websites" look promising.

I didn't find timeanddate here, although I bet it shows up, and I can't vouch for many of these as going through this remains on the to-do list...

3. I was a submariner in a past life, and on that basis alone would recommend going through The Rickover Corpus, which is an archive of the speeches and memos of the father of America's nuclear navy.

The commenters on this thread at Hacker News would seem to agree that it is worthwhile.

4. On some preliminary inspection, I'm not sure how useful this thread on tricks of the trade that folks in technology think they "took too long to learn" will be. That said, a couple of things keep it on the list for perusal during a walk some time, so I'll log it here, too.

-- CAV

'Out of Touch' Advice Can Be Worse Than Rude

Over at Ask a Manager, someone asks about a bit of advice I once got twenty years ago and also dismissed: Show up at potential employers and hand-deliver a printed-out resume!

While almost anyone hearing this will laugh and move on, it is worthwhile to read Alison Green's complete demolition because it shows the value of taking the time to understand and evaluate advice

Green replies in part:

First, they're highly likely to just tell you that you need to apply online ... because you do in fact need to apply online. As has been the case for a long time now, most organizations use electronic applicant tracking systems. If your application isn't in there, it's not getting considered.

Second, with the rise in remote work, a ton of people don't even work at companies' main addresses anymore. There may not be anyone involved in hiring for the position even physically there. And even if they're there, they're generally going to be very busy and aren't going to come out and talk to you just because you randomly showed up holding a resume -- so anyone you do talk to is incredibly unlikely to have anything to do with hiring for that particular job.

Third, it will still annoy the crap out of most people involved in hiring and make you look naive/out of touch at best ... and at worst, like you don't think instructions apply to you. Their instructions are there for a reason. [bold added]

Alison goes a bit further to note that the time spent on such an exercise would be better-spent doing much more effective things.

In addition to showing a disregard for the potential employer, blindly following the advice would hinder one's own progress in other ways on top of that.

Sometimes, one can see how ridiculous an idea is by imagining how implementing it would work out, but if in doubt, do as the letter-writer did and seek out a more experienced third party you respect.

-- CAV

Trump Effs Around, and an American Sector Finds Out

Over at Reason, two articles show in general and specific terms how Donald Trump's ignorant and unprovoked trade war is backfiring.

The first of these is a piece about just three things the President got wrong -- Life is short. -- in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he took a pretend victory lap.

He was far from perfect, but on top of being correct, Ronald Reagan builds more broad-based political momentum in one six minute address than Trump has built (or can build) in eons of name-calling and chain-yanking.

Although everyone except Trump and his yes-men understand that trade deficits are not, in fact, a problem, the below is my "favorite," since a major stated premise for imposing illegal import taxes is to "fix" this "problem:"

Trump's op-ed claims that he has "slashed our monthly trade deficit by an astonishing 77%."

That would be astonishing. But in reality, the Census Bureau reported last week that the trade deficit increased -- not decreased -- by nearly 37 percent in November, the most recent month for which data are available. Through the first 11 months of 2025, the trade deficit was 4 percent higher than it had been in 2024. That is literally the opposite of what Trump is claiming.

It's somewhat astonishing that the Journal allowed such a wildly misleading claim to appear in its pages. Someone really should have fact-checked this before it went to print. [links in original, bold added]

The second describes how the combination of Trump's tariffs, his continuous insults aimed at our neighbors to the north, and the fact that, strangely enough, people who are treated badly often return the favor, have wreaked havoc on American wineries and distilleries, who used to enjoy brisk trade with Canada -- the top export destination for their products:

As reported by The Independent, large distilling companies like Brown-Forman Corporation (producer of Jack Daniel's) have seen their organic net sales to Canada plummet by 60 percent in the first half of the 2026 fiscal year. Jim Beam faced such a significant drop in sales from both the Canadian boycott and the general drying up of its international markets on account of the tariff wars that it suspended production entirely at its flagship plant.

According to The Independent, smaller distillers in states like Minnesota have suffered 70 percent declines in sales and have been forced to ship production to Canada by working with Canadian contract distillers. The result, in turn, is fewer U.S.-based manufacturing jobs and more Canadian-based jobs. [links in original, bold added]

MAGA, blinded by its confusion of rank bullying with decisiveness and masculinity, is fond of the motto, FAFO.

Too bad that motto applies to our economy due to one clueless dolt effing around, while his lackeys in Congress sit on their hands, leaving us all to find out.

-- CAV

Trump's Magical Thinking on Credit

David Harsanyi rightly calls out Trump's demagoguery on credit card rates by likening them to the anti-capitalist rhetoric and price control policies of New York's new, socialist mayor:

Banks are businesses, after all, not charities.

Image from Ways and Means Democrats.

But if banks lose out charging riskier customers lower interest rates to get on the good side of the administration, they'll simply raise fees elsewhere, pull back on rewards and find other creative ways to make their reliable consumers pay.

Price-fixing never alleviates cost -- it merely displaces it.

Take Mamdani, the socialist mayor of New York, as he "cracks down," as one travel magazine referred to it, on "junk fees" in city hotels.

"Junk" is just a description of a cost that consumers and politicians have arbitrarily decided shouldn't be paid.

But they will be: Hotels will almost inevitably raise prices elsewhere or decrease services to make up for it.

Economic magical thinking never dies, however, because it's tethered to envy and anger rather than rationality.

Harsanyi even follows this with a quote from Thomas Sowell, whom I am tempted to call "The Forgotten Man of the Right," although that might be debatable, as some Democrats, at least, seem to remember him fondly.

My one criticism of this fine piece is that I wish it had explicitly stated the underlying economic principle, that price controls cause shortages. But then again, perhaps Harsanyi knows that his audience will be able to figure it out, while the rest won't, or won't care.

-- CAV

Why Populism Leads to Kakistocracy

It's about a 20 minute read, but I highly recommend Richard Hanania's thought-provoking essay titled "Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism" for its exploration of what populist means, and of what we can learn by looking at the track records of successful populist movements across the globe.

I am impressed with Hanania's successful navigation of both the vagueness of the term populist and the problem of finding concrete data to make his point about the adverse outcomes of populism.

A notable reason populism leads to poor government is that the blanket skepticism of institutions and "elites" that puts a populist into power comes from a kind of poor thinking that will insulate the populist leader from scrutiny:

The problem with a less educated support base is that it simply has a less accurate understanding of the world. In fact, I think the problem is much worse than a simple analysis of voting patterns by educational attainment would suggest. Populists not only often fail to appeal to college graduates as a broad class, but they do particularly poorly among the small slice of the public that is the most informed about policy and current events, like journalists and academics.

...

Politicians that have a less educated base can make bad decisions and suffer fewer consequences for them. The fact that Trump is personally responsible through his tariffs policy for current economic woes is obvious to any informed observer, but might not be to an uninformed one. Trump's base has lower cognitive ability and less interest in politics anyway, so they are probably less likely to be shaken out of their partisan stupor by empirical reality. No one can deny that leftists are also often partisan in their thinking. But that partisanship is tempered by access to and a willingness to accept accurate sources of information. The New York Times is simply more likely to challenge the biases of its audience than Catturd, Elon Musk, or Fox News, and liberals are more likely to trust and accept real news than conservatives are.

A bit later in the essay, Hanania describes a fundamental error I see MAGA types make all the time:

We often focus on instances where elites reject ideas that turn out to be at least arguably correct. It is common to see discussions of universities or media outlets excluding or disparaging positions like opposition to DEI, skepticism over the claims of trans activists, or belief that covid leaked from a Chinese lab. In those instances, elite institutions can reasonably be criticized for having dismissed ideas they should have taken more seriously. That said, we must not lose sight of the fact that most of the time gatekeepers push people or ideas away, the establishment is right and the rebels are wrong.

Here's a partial list of ideas that are rejected by mainstream academics and journalists, but have been promoted or gotten respectable hearings on the Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the country, over the last few years: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV does not cause AIDS; there were advanced ancient human civilizations during the Ice Age; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination. If you are mad at academia because you think it is too woke on issues related to race and gender, note that it also excludes believers in telepathy, ghosts, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, flat Earth theory, reptilian overlords, chemtrails, Bigfoot, astrology as science, Holocaust denial, moon landing hoax theories, homeopathy, and spirit channeling of the dead. Of course, the most common reason institutions reject people is lack of intelligence and work ethic. [bold added]

Hanania's further observation that populists, especially on the right, appeal to identity politics are on point.

Hanania ends by arguing that populism should be seen as another political axis. I'm not sure I agree with him about that, but I do think his term Dale Gribble voter captures something important about the type of voter that supoorts Trump, and has supported similar politicians in the past.

-- CAV

Four Wins

A Friday Hodgepodge

Whenever possible, I list three wins at the end of each day. Here are a few from a recent review of my planner.

***

1. Until recently, I was unaware that one could cook barley like pasta, rather than like rice. This is so much easier that it blows my mind that anyone cooks it like rice, at least on the stovetop.

This is good news for my wife, because this makes a favorite family recipe of hers easier enough for me to make that she'll get to enjoy it more often.

(No. I haven't posted that one here, but I might. I finally got this to turn out perfectly and want to rewrite it first.)

2. Helping with a stage of my in-laws' move allowed me to vet a local moving crew, which will come in handy when we move our daughter upstairs into her permanent bedroom. They did good work, and I got a reasonable idea of what the leader will need when we're ready in about a month.

That's one less thing to deal with in the meantime.

3. The light controller for the Christmas tree we bought last year had no off setting, so we replaced it.

Thanks to a brief power outage, I learned that the new controller doesn't really have an off setting, either. As soon as the power came back on, the tree lit up, despite being "off" before.

There are worse ways to learn that something is not fail-safe.

It's back to something I already have and know works. I'm done wasting money on light controllers.

4. Dave Barry might admire how I got myself out of wrapping Christmas gifts this year: I paid my son to do it after I saw what a fine job he did on a gift for his sister.

We both win! he said after he finished and I forked over thirty bucks. I couldn't have put it better, myself.

-- CAV

Windows 11 Makes Converts -- to Linux

Although, only a couple of years earlier, I openly described myself as a technophobe, I switched to using Linux as my primary operating system way back in 1996 and have used it as such ever since. I was recently-divorced and needed to make the best use of an already obsolescent 486 PC to get myself the rest of the way through grad school, and the switch saved me lots of money for other things.

It also, as I could tell any time I had to use a PC or a Mac, saved me lots of annoyance and inconvenience. Having to get my hands dirty came with the added knowledge that things don't have to be this way when dealing with the two most popular proprietary systems.

Fast forward to now, and one long-time Windows user reports numerous problems with Windows updates and describes his turning point in part as follows:

So there I was, finally grasping the reality of what you're up against, as a Windows user:

• Random bugs that break basic functionality
• Updates that install without permission and brick my system
• Copilot and OneDrive ads appearing in every corner of the OS
• Copilot buttons everywhere, coming for every application
• Can't even make a local account without hacking the setup with Rufus (they even removed the terminal workaround)
• Zero actionable fixes or even an acknowledgment of their fuckups [There is an impressive list of these elsewhere in his piece. --ed]

People often say Linux is "too much work.".

And I agree. They're completely justified to complain. There's the documentation page diving, the forums, the reddit threads. And, most importantly, you have to basically rewire your brain and stop expecting it to behave like Windows used to.

But I looked at the list above and realized: Windows is now also too much work.

And the difference with Windows is that you're going to do all that work while actively fighting your computer only for it to be undone when the next surprise update comes and ruins everything.

You might be thinking "just disable updates, man" or "just install LTSC", or "just run some random debloat script off of GitHub". Why? Why would I jump through all these hoops? I'd rather put in the effort for an OS that knows what consent is and respects me as a user.

Being at the mercy of random major changes that require me to drop everything to repair my broken workflow is something I have observed for years that has kept me from entertaining the idea of leaving Linux, but now it appears to have become bad enough to cause Microsoft to lose customers.

If this guy reminds you of yourself (perhaps minus the anti-corporate tone), you might consider Linux. And here's a report from another person who just made the switch. ("I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great.")

-- CAV